Elie Wiesel in 2010. His house is a protected historical monument.
Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters

Romanian police began an investigation on Saturday after antisemitic graffiti appeared on the house of the late Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel in north-west Romania.

The probe was launched after comments in bright pink paint were scrawled overnight on Wiesel’s small house – a protected historical monument – in the town of Sighetu Marmației. One of the comments said Wiesel was “in hell with Hitler”.

The group Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism in Romania called it an act of vandalism against the “memory of Elie Wiesel, the memory of the Holocaust victims and the souls of the Holocaust survivors”.

The Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania called for a thorough inquiry. It said Romania’s president and government have pledged to fight antisemitism and Holocaust denial in Romania, where some have denied or downplayed the country’s role in the Holocaust.

Wiesel and his family were among 14,000 Jews deported in May 1944 to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz from the town, formerly called Sighet. His mother and younger sister died there while he and his two older sisters survived. At the time of the deportation northern Transylvania, including Sighet, was in Hungary, an Axis member that had just been occupied outright by the Nazis.

Wiesel died in 2016. His 1960 book Night drew on his experiences in the death camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, becoming a testament to Nazi crimes. He won the Nobel peace prize in 1986.

In wartime Romania under pro-Nazi dictator Ion Antonescu, 150,000 Jews and 25,000 Roma people were deported to Transnistria – a devastated part of previously Soviet west Ukraine taken over by Romania at the time. There, the deportees were murdered, interned, worked to death, starved. Few survived. Transnistria’s original Jewish population, numbering many tens of thousands, was also killed.

Romania currently has a population of around 19.6 million, including about 6,000 Jews.

• This article was amended on 8 August 2018. It was made clear that at the time of the May 1944 deportation, Sighet was in Hungary. A separate reference to Romania’s deportation of 150,000 Jews and 25,000 Roma was corrected because it said their destination was Nazi concentration camps.